Pthigrivi

Look, Nate is just the creative director. He’s the highest person up on the totem pole who’s name we happen to know. I think Nate made some directorial mistakes for sure, we all do. But there were also a huge number of really smart and inspired decisions from the very beginning. But in the end the creative director is not the one who decides when a game is released. The entire executive structure at PD and many at T2 are involved. I have little doubt the folks at IG were essentially given a date and forced to make it work as best they could. Of course we have no idea for sure what the internal dynamic was and probably never will. Im just not willing to cast blame on one dude without knowing that. From the very beginning he’s been incredibly passionate and creative and I for one believe he’s a decent dude doing his best to make KSP what it could be.

Yeah I mean some of this is subjective and speculative but I agree with most of it and definitely with the overall thrust of the analysis. Even in my own small company projects have revenue cycles and often start with long periods of time in which we aren’t billing much or at all. If you take short-cuts and screw up the process and deliverable product the result is you lose out on almost all of the potential gains. The decision to force a too-early EA probably meant a small percentage savings in initial dev capital but cost them essentially all of the potential profit. This wasn’t a decision based on a 5 or 10 year profit analysis and certainly hurt both PD and T2 long term. This was yet another short-sighted move based on some upper exec showing cash on the table quarter by quarter with no concern for or understanding of the long term consequences.

All good questions. At a certain point counterfactuals are impossible to predict. I do think though most of the worst offenders then and even now don’t really require the full playerbase to identify. These are all common enough for QA. Wobbly rockets were more than a tuning problem—its hard to say. But at least with the basic foundation of science and progression there would have been a game to dig into.

Im sure there are many who feel that way. I played through FS and had a great time. Yeah there were bugs but I would expect that from EA. If those got cleared up along side new content over the course of this year I think we’d be on a good track. I just don’t ultimately think that matters. Only weirdos like us follow the inside baseball of who said what when about release dates. What matters is the actual experience when its released. What we got last year was beyond rough and it killed growth. I think what we have now would have been good enough for day one.

[Snip] Ultimately I think it came down to a single decision—KSP2 should have been delayed a year. If we got the game we currently have as the initial EA launch we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There would have been bugs, yeah, there would still be missing pieces, but we’d have a solidly playable foundation for growth. With a few updates and colonies in the fall I think a lot of positive momentum could have been maintained. Ultimately it was a lack of patience.

We don’t know that, and even if he’s kept on that doesn’t make it less devastating. These are people dude.

I’ll probably write more later when we know more but absolutely—Nate, Tom, Shana, Chris, Dakota and dozens of incredibly talented people who lent so much passion, creativity and perseverance to this game: you’re the best and Im so sorry all this happened. It really isn’t fair.

Yall. Many of his friends and colleagues have lost their jobs and the project he poured his soul into the last several years is probably cancelled. Give him a little time. The whole situation is probably really hard on him.

How unusual is that we’ve gotten no official word on any of this?

Just for the record SZ has been very critical and skeptical of decisions and communication about the game. He’s just been hopeful they could turn it around. We don’t know what the outcome will be in the fine detail but he was pretty clear in his last vid that none of it sounds good. No matter what a lot of folks have lost their jobs and that really sucks.

Shadowzone has a vid up about it. Doesn't sound great, and the longer we don't get word the more it seems like the news will be bad. Just really sucks for all the folks who worked so hard on this.

Oh yeah I guess I should say sandbox in the broader sense of the word rather than as we've known it in KSP, an open building environment sans progression and story elements.

Again though resources can accomplish all of that, and I would argue resources are a better fit for KSP because its more like crafting than purchasing and creates natural rather than artificial goals to go out and gather and process them. Missions are okay for folks who like direction but without resources KSP isn’t really a full and open sandbox experience.

We should probably have this conversation in a separate dedicated thread because it is a really good topic and might be worth revisiting. To keep it short though: if you have resources you already have a mechanism for limiting vessel size and weight, its just the "cost" is measured in resources rather than a separate abstract currency that rapidly looses its meaning and value as you start to develop off-world. You don't need money to solve this in the early game, you can just offer resources in limited quantities at KSC from the start. That way the game has a consistent set of mechanics throughout gameplay. On EA being a good time to discuss this I totally agree. This could also be its whole own thread. Again to keep the response short the reason KSP1 XP didn't really work was 2-fold: 1) agree with others it was limiting functions like SAS that should be unlocked from the start, and 2) XP requires you to track the progress of each individual kerbal and as Aziz points out repeat many of the same tasks for each kerbal over and over. I think there could and probably should be an expanding set of skills and buffs for kerbals but these should be applied colony wide or game-wide. We wouldn't want a game thats about building multiple colonies and multiple resource mining and science gathering and operations to lend itself to just a few kerbals we grew attached to personally. I think it's very likely we'll have dozens, and tracking XP on an individual basis means a lot of time spent fussing in crew roster menus rather than building and flying spaceships. To apply these kinds of skills colony wide or program wide would just mean adding a specific module or unlocking a skill on the tech tree and it could apply for all your kerbals. We don't yet know how kerbal skills might play out but that would be my recommendation. Oh this is all, absolutely my opinion. I've been following KSP for many years and a lot of the information about how KSP2 will be different was out there long before the EA release. We knew money was out and there was no mention of careers or XP so I personally assumed they were out too. I (my opinion) feel as though those decisions--given the eventual scope of KSP2 and for the reasons mentioned above--were actually really smart and gives me much more confidence that when resources are introduced and the game really takes shape it won't be an utter slog to play. KSP2's scope is much bigger and that means a lot of the fuss needs to get cut so bigger things have room to breathe. Of course I don't agree with all of their decisions. I think the LoS comnet system is actually a really great spatial and navigation puzzle that really exploits KSP's unique nature to give depth to gameplay. Its one of those unique gameplay stories that only KSP can tell. I also think not implementing a planetary scanning system similar to SCANsat is a mistake for the same reason. Maybe it will be added with resources, but even now it could be a great way to gather information on biomes and discover anomalies in a much more natural way. It would also greatly improve pacing and the mission tree as right now we're sent on a pretty linear path from site to site and the order doesn't really match up well with actual landing difficulty. It would both be easier for new players and deeper for old players to be asked first to put a satellite in a polar orbit and that would create the natural choice of visiting the discoverables in whichever order you prefered. One of the dev's key goals was to smooth-out the learning curve and this would help immensely with that. I also think the lack of interest in life support is probably a mistake as time and living off the land are so critical to the future of space exploration and it's a very obvious way to leverage what KSP has going to create great game dynamics. But! Thats just my 2c.

You were never told those things would be in the game. Funds are redundant once we have resources. XP and classes are the biggest source of grind in KSP1 once you have more than 6 kerbals in your program and KSP2 is likely to have dozens if not hundreds. Its a different game. When colonies are released we’ll know more. When Resources are released we’ll have a full game with all of the constraints necessary. Its gonna be a while. Im fine with that. Ive always been fine with waiting so long as the game itself is well constructed. KSP 2 does have issues but a lack of money and xp grind are not among them.

Thanks, Nate and all! Dang those thunderheads!

This is over the top. The same roadmap is still there—colonies, interstellar, resources, multiplayer. At each stage we can gauge the deliverables. Folks don’t get fresh info for a couple months and we’re all back to chicken little acrimony. How about a little chill. I don’t disagree with life support, I think there’s real bang for buck there. Robotics would be great too but aren’t as integral to a functioning resource system which is the real spine of a live-off-the-land fleshed out colony system. More planets and interstellar are coming, code and money are probably out and for mods. Just to point out the obvious: I care quite a bit about KSP, it was my favorite game for many years, I check this forum daily, and still there is no player for whom KSP is a bigger part of their lives than the people who are currently working on this game. If the worst thing imaginable happened and KSP got cancelled you will all move on with your lives with no disruption. Thats not the case for the people at intercept. Take a moment as a fellow human being to acknowledge that these folks are all pouring their careers into a very cool thing that is for you a pleasant distraction. Definitely give feedback. Definitely give negative feedback. But be real and treat these folks like they’re humans doing their best with the resources they have just like you are with whatever it is you do. Speak your mind, but be patient and be chill. No one likes to be harassed at work and nothing about a video game is worth harassment.

Anyone have experience/ recommendations on prebuilt sellers? ABS, MSi, iBuypower etc? Mainly Im looking for reliability and good support.

No I totally get this and it is a fine balance. You do have to be practical about how and when you change things. Im an architect so I see both sides of it. Since Wube has a pretty stellar perception among fans I thought I'd use this recent Factorio Friday Facts as an illustration (Full text here). Basically the story was they had a whole planet designed but after seeing it in action it just felt boring so they dropped most of the initial design and started from scratch. I think the result is pretty awesome. I've also mentioned Cyberpunk a few times. They've utterly reinvented the perk tree and loot drop system--two of the most core elements in an RPG--much for the better. But if early on they said "Oh yeah btw we're just going to remove most of the value of randomized armor and clothes will basically be cosmetic" people would have thrown even more of a fit. They wouldn't have any of the first-hand play experience to realize wandering around looking like a spazoid because some random tshirt had a better AC stat isn't actually good gameplay and since the game is all about cybernetic modification it doesn't make sense in that world anyway. In the end cleaning up the messy, incomplete release and implementing those kinds of major overhauls took 3 years. When it comes to some of these creative processes sometimes you've just got to try things and see if they work. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't, and yeah its not efficient and it takes a long time, but in the end it's the only way new ideas can be made to actually work.

I have no argument with the first part of your post because I actually do think negative feedback on the merits of actual content is great and useful and totally warranted. I just think it can be done politely and without taking any of this quite so personally as some seem to. Maybe Im wrong and they really do feel personally wounded by this, but it feels to me kind of hyperbolic and hyperbolic arguments don't mean much. This last bit though I do disagree with, mainly because Im in a creative field and doing this kind of work is rarely a linear process. If you're really vetting and testing and and seeing what works and what doesn't there will be lots of things that appear one way as WIP and emerge completely differently as a finished product. That ability to make big changes along the way is really important to producing good work, but folks watching from the outside or only seeing small snippets might not understand how you got from A to B. Normally thats fine, but given how folks tend to react to being shown one thing and being delivered another I wouldn't blame them at all for just keeping everything under wraps. Making creative and practical changes to better the end-product doesn't make you a liar, but there are a great many folks here who will find a way to frame it that way and thats a drag for all involved. Yeah totally. I may have said this here on another thread but for me KSP2 probably won't return as my main gaming obsession until resources are implemented. I still kinda wish they would swap interstellar and resources for that reason, but I know resources is probably the hardest gameplay nut to crack so its gonna be a while anyway.

The point is that the tone of personal aggrievement is so wildly overstated given the actual stakes of the situation that it just can’t be taken seriously. The actual things you mentioned: wobble, font, UI, orbital decay and I would add my own list absolutely were of the highest priority and everyone was pretty clear on that. Again those are genuine substantive issues and 100% fair game. They have and are tackling those things as they should be. You’ve got to realize though by focusing instead on “but you promised!” complaints you’re actually disincentivizing transparency, because any sneak peak or WIP or planned feature leak just becomes fodder for more accusations of false promises, even if features are cut or altered for legitimate reasons. If fans are going to throw a fit every time their expectations aren’t met its best to just not say or release anything until its fully ready.

No I completely agree. The latter is exactly what folks should do, and I haven’t been shy in voicing my own view on missing game elements that are sorely holding the game back (primarily flight and transfer planning tools, but also the lack of planetary mapping, no plans for LS, etc. ) I also acknowledge that Im just one data point among many and thats my personal perspective. I guess I think the genuine substance of the critique is enough and can only be muddied by dredging up personal slights.

So Im definitely going to dip in and try out colonies and interstellar but what Im really here for is resources. Thats when KSP becomes a real game for me. Probably gonna be a minute but thats fine. I like dabbling in the meantime. Even to do that more seriously though Im going to need to see some major improvements to maneuvers, transfers, and flight planning.

My question is: if all negative feedback is framed in the same tone of personally aggrieved apoplexy about process and promises rather than actual content and quality why and how should anyone take it seriously? Why not skip the theater and performative anger of it all and just cut to the actual, substantive feedback? Because as far as I can tell the former achieves nothing and dilutes and distracts from the latter.